Canada’s last breakup, with Great Britain, took roughly 100 years of painstaking and piecemeal constitutional reform to accomplish. This time, things are moving a little faster. Since President Donald Trump launched his trade war against his closest neighbor shortly after taking office a second time—leveling tariffs of up to 50 percent on hundreds of goods—relations have been icy, and keep getting icier. “Canadian-American relations go back and forth, and they sometimes get fairly bad,” Norman Hillmer, Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton University and a leading historian on the subject, told me. This time, however, it feels as though the love is really gone. “They’ve never been like this,” he said. “This is right off the charts.”
While the White House has been issuing a torrent of threats—including promises to use “economic force” to annex Canada, and hints at other more direct methods, like forced annexation—Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been quietly hunting for new suitors. For over a year, The Wall Street Journal reports, he has been exchanging sweet nothings on long-distance phone calls with the leaders of the Old Continent. Canada, he teases foreign leaders, is open for business. Its huge tracts of land are just waiting to be exploited—its amber grain, pink potash, and hot natural gas overflowing in abundance. And with generous new tax incentives to rival even American corporate giveaways, it’ll even pick up the check. We’re just like America, he hints—only sweeter.
It would seem Europe got the message. In her State of the Union address to the European Parliament in September, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, if anything, came on too strong. Tearing the corset of EU precedent, she proposed a wholly invented new category of “associate member” for Canada. “We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world,” she fawned. “And we will now build our shared future as well.”
What, exactly, “associate member” would mean is anyone’s guess; officials on both sides soon played it down with mild embarrassment. In his response, Carney referred only to “an alliance for the future.” Some members of the European Parliament responded with the bitterness of a rejected suitor. “It was an absurd and unrealistic knee-jerk reaction,” Siegbert Frank Droese, a far-right German MEP, lamented. Europe simply wanted “the closest possible” relationship, President of the European Council Antonio Costa clarified. “I don’t think we should get too bogged down with words and labeling,” Mark Camilleri of the Canada EU Trade and Investment Association told me, channeling the consummate bachelor.
In Carney’s Don Draper–esque world of jet-setting luncheons and grenadine ties, this was a play well-executed. Just look, he seemed to say. They’re throwing themselves at us. His oblique references to America’s boorishness on the world stage—“economic integration is now being weaponised, and tariffs are being used as a means of pressure”—likewise hit their mark. “Laughable,” Trump huffed, before striking the paternalistic note of the bitter ex. “If it’s a good intention, that’s fine,” he said. “If it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe.”
For most Canadians, this is all a fantasy worthy of fan fiction. Many Canadians, especially of Carney’s urbane class, have long nurtured the aspirational notion that they are closer in character to Europeans than to their neighbors to the south. They tend to look fondly on a welfare state. Their genteel gradualism, born of their lengthy breakup with Britain, makes them natural partners for slow, set-in-their-ways European institutions; their common-law conventions make them reluctant rebels, studious observers of norms and traditions.
This makes Canada a particularly appealing ally: reliable and rich, not to mention well-resourced. Canada has long vowed that its friendship comes with access to the critical minerals, uranium, and gas Europe sorely needs. Carney has even forsworn his nation’s traditional “ick” regarding militarization as he pours money into defense to spur economic growth. In mid-September, he promised “to produce millions of drones within the next two years,” signing a 100-year pact to arm Ukraine against Russia—offering a deeper commitment to that conflict than anyone in Europe has been able to muster.
A well-armed, well-funded Canada offers Europe more than just resources: It is also strategically positioned to see the continent through the next century of war and warming. As long as it maintains sovereignty over the Northwest Passage (a fact the United States has long denied), it controls the only Arab- and Russian-free route from Europe to Asia, offering secure shipping no matter the EU’s stance on Israel, Ukraine, Iran, or America’s next war.
All to say, it is no surprise Europe leaped so quickly to the idea of Canadian “associate membership.” After all, a diplomatic coup with Canada would also help cover a growing rot at the heart of the European Union: its own ambivalence toward expansion. With a lengthy line of corrupt economies and shaky democracies waiting at its door, the EU’s regulatory bouncers can’t even relax the rules enough to woo the likes of Iceland, which voted down nonbinding negotiations in August in a high-profile rebuke to Eurocrats. For Europe, too, Canada represents something fresh—a new, deeper, more harmonious relationship, free from the baggage of past disappointments.
But what, you might ask, would Canada gain from flirting with a club its own members want to leave? In some conservative corners, news of Carney’s surprise European romance prompted alarm from those fattened on a drip-feed of Brexit-style panic. Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s nonentity of an opposition leader, issued dire warnings of becoming Europe’s “twenty-eighth state” and falling victim to “reckless European-style immigration.”
Those fears are deliberately naïve—any labor mobility agreement would require painstaking negotiations with each of Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories. But it did not stop Canada’s more affluent and liberal-minded communities from fantasizing about a future of visa-free work and travel, or other supposed fruits of Carney’s flirtation: lower tuition at Europe’s universities, fancier cheese, better wine. The potential dowry was hard to deny—hundreds of billions in European funds and investments, unlocked; a chance, finally, to sell Canada’s family jewels to the right sort of buyer.
Canada had long since signed on to the more feasible aspects of this exchange. It still struggles to fill its quota for some tariff-free European food products under a free-trade agreement signed in 2016 (and still unratified by 10 EU states). Italian wine is already cheaper than Canadian on many liquor store shelves. Canada long ago signed onto Europe’s $106 billion research fund, Horizon Europe, and its defense procurement agreement, SAFE. It remains to be seen what more could actually be done in terms of formal ties with the continent, besides slightly cheaper exchanges to the Sorbonne for the children of Canada’s wealthiest families.
In reality, what Europe offers Canada is something far less tangible: an implication. Europe’s interest in Canada shows there is a new deep-pocketed benefactor willing to slot into the role being vacated by a self-destructing United States. “What happened in Strasbourg this week very much also has to be seen as a sign signaled to an American audience,” Achim Hurrelmann, director of Carleton University’s Centre for European Studies, told me in September. There is a growing realization on both sides of the Atlantic, in no small part prompted by Carney’s repeated calls for a new global order, that the United States will not fully recover after Trump; that this new phase of American bellicosity and dysfunction may be a generational phenomenon. As Carney made clear in his lauded speech at Davos, he sees the solution as an alliance of “middle powers,” a global nonaligned movement of capable, middle-class democracies—a normal kids club, rich and stable enough to stand up to the world’s bullies.
It’s perhaps a little damning that the European Union, once thought a possible global hegemon in its own right, was among the first on Carney’s invite list. Carney has been explicit: His goal is not to seriously challenge U.S. power by crafting a new “great power rival … with better manners.” Rather, it’s to insulate his country—and, if you take him at his word, the civilized world—from the more insane impulses of America’s increasingly unhinged government—like the sudden defunding of USAID.
In this sense, Carney’s priority areas for collaboration are revealing: AI policy, financial services, and defense are all still overly dependent on rules and systems designed in America. The companies that dominate those fields are, of course, also based in America. As its rules on data protection and its standardization of charging ports show, one thing the European Union can still do is use the weight of its sizable consumer market to dictate the rules of the capitalist game, as it is currently trying to do in several areas, most notably tech regulation. Part of Carney’s calculus is the bet that this can also work in state procurement.
There are reasons to be skeptical. Carney’s bid for closer ties with Europe comes at a time when the continent’s governments—and the EU itself—are struggling to resist a tidal wave of right-wing populism. Any substantial agreement may see Carney shaking hands with Germany’s first far-right chancellor since the last one shot himself in a bunker. While Trump is addled and ineffectual, the far-right in Europe is operating with a genuine democratic mandate—at least, as long as there is any democracy left.
But it’s quite possible that Carney simply doesn’t care. Like a true banker, he has already demonstrated a remarkable agnosticism regarding the origins of the dollars he hopes will build his nation by buying its assets. Attendees at a high-profile investment summit in Toronto just before his trip to Strasbourg included prominent Trump donors, alongside state-backed wealth funds from China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. In the pitch book was the usual offer of mines and pipelines, but also key strategic assets like airports, rocket launchpads, and fiber-optic lines. Carney drew the ire of Canadian progressives for his willingness to sell out the country’s few remaining public assets. But he appears to be a true believer in trickle-down economics: Enriching a class of highly mobile, global investors, he seems to reason, will make Canadians wealthier so long as they are enriched on Canadian soil.
That should offer some consolation to Americans worried about their place in the world, or their special relationship with their neighbors to the north. Get yourself a few billion dollars in assets, and even the debonair likes of Carney will still fling open the doors, lay out the family china, and attempt to woo you from your wallet. It’s also a sad indication that, like many partners in abusive relationships, Canada may not be able to resist crawling back to the United States if it puts on a serious show of being reformed. “That’s a question that I’ve heard Europeans ask,” Hurrelmann told me. “What happens when the trade war is over? Will Canada still be interested in these types of things?”
The answer to that question is hard to discern while Trump continues blustering from the White House. Like many genteel Canadians, Carney likely may have an inclination to lean away from America anyway—from its increasingly crass politics, debased culture, and unrestrained greed. Canadians may be more American than they like to admit, but they are not as American as America is now. Another few years of accelerating decay may simply be too much to come back from. For now, at least, Canada is exploring its options—and it doesn’t seem inclined to wait around. Jilted lovers seldom do.
